Website Statistics Report: Popular Pages
Overview
This covers both the “Popular Pages” and “Popular Pages Today” reports.
The popular pages report counts the number of times each page has been viewed by visitors to the website and therefore it is an excellent indication of which parts of your site are most popular with your visitors.
Optimising your site to work well with this report will bring additional benefits , so don’t skip the “Optimising your site for this report” section of this document.
Report Options
As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs and there is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.
The date range feature is useful for this report because if you add a new page (a new product or news story for example) and want to see how it fairs against other pages you will need to run the report from the time the new page went live. Otherwise other pages will have a head start and the data will be less useful.
Additionally this report also allows you to view pages by Url as well as Title. You will quickly determine the method that suits you best but note that the Url takes the unfiltered Url to call the page, whereas the Title takes the <title> tag from inside your pages html.
How this Report Works with the Log
Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.
To understand how to get best use of this report read
Managing Website Session Log help document.
Optimising your site for this Report
This report can be one of the most useful to you. It can tell you which area’s of your site are the most popular and which products and services are most interesting to your visitors. Depending on the information you want to know good planning of your <title> tags can have great effect.
Basic rules are:
- Make all <title> tags unique to each page
- Rather than having pages that contain lots of information split it down into a number of sub pages and give each their own title
For example rather than having a page about your companies “Business Services” split into multiple pages and give each a distinct title.
> Business Services – Accounting
> Business Services – Book Keeping
> Business Services – Tax Advice
You will soon see in the Popular Pages report which of these services is most interesting to your visitors.
Dynamic database driven websites
In database driven websites it is typically the case that one file/page renders content pulled from a database. For example a website selling CDs could have a page called cddetails.aspx that shows the album artwork and track listing for a selected CD. The
CD whose details are shown is determined by the structure of the website and can vary, for example by using a query string parameter.
There are two main ways you can use the pages <title> tags here.
1. The first is to have the <title> tag remain the same no matter what CD is being shown.
2. The second is to dynamically set the title tag to the name of the CD.
Both of these methods have their benefits. The first method will show you which CDs are popular and this can help you tune your shops catalogue.
The second method will show you that this particular page is popular and that people are interested in the information that it contains.
An example of use for this is the WebVisitor.info site itself, which of course we track. Broadly speaking we use the second method, i.e. we have static page titles. We are more interested in which reports and features you, our beloved users, are interested in, rather than which of our customers Websites are most checked most often.
Therefore you will notice that the page title for the Popular Pages report is simply “Report: Popular Pages” rather than one containing your website, such as “www.bbc.co.uk - Popular Pages.
Of course we want to know which of our customers sites are checked most often and so we use the first method on the home page for each site, which is title “Website Home: [Website Name Here]”.
Of course I’m sure you will have your own ideas, and please feel free to share them with us, but in conclusion you can see that with careful planning of your <title> tags, dynamic websites can get lots of good information from this report.